Just finished Fred Stoller's Kindle Single. A thoroughly entertaining story, and also totally innovative in the "I'm-Gonna-Self-Publish" sorta way. I came away from it with admiration and respect for him as a human being. In particular, I love the way he is completely conscious of his own neuroses and those of the people around him, especially his mother and Larry David. The truth that comes from that way of thinking is liberating.

Thanks, Althouse, for mentioning this on your blog. I had heard Fred recently on Mark Maron's WTF podcast, but I wouldn't have read the book if you hadn't recommended it.

You should write a Kindle single, Althouse! I'd buy it, no matter what it is about.

I love the Super Bowl. Sorry the Packers didn't make it; I would've liked a Patriots/Cheeseheads matchup. I went over to Trooper York's to see what Giants-induced miasma he was emitting, but alas Casa de Troop is now a gated community. Us 99 percenters can only wonder what goes on in there.

Althouse knows that the real interesting conversations are with the kind of men who retire to the drawing room after dinner to discuss politics over cigars and expensive cognac. She realizes this point.

Actually there's a kernel of historical connection in your better German word. From They Thought They Were Free, about the rise of Nazi control in Germany:

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.